DEV Community

Discussion on: How did linguistics influence programming?

Collapse
 
yucer profile image
yucer • Edited

I think that the advances in Linguistics of Noam Chomsky and others were a cornerstone of Compiler Theory.

Recently Semantic computing is also the basis of the last industrial revolution (based on knowledge discovery and knowledge management).

So... how much has linguistics influenced programming ? A lot !

In daily tasks you can see it also. We need to code in such a way that it can be understandable not only by computers, also by humans.

For example, using negated names for boolean variables is not good. Try to read this:

if not not_exclude_TERM:
  ....

Your brain need extra time to understand that code. It is useful to name all boolean variables in positive, and also the checkbox labels in the user preferences.

That's only one example.